In this study, the authors propose a novel methodology for static gesture recognition in a complex background using only depth map from Microsoft's Kinect camera. Four different types of features are extracted and analysed on two public static gesture datasets. The features extracted from the segmented hand are geometrical, local binary patterns, number of fingers (Num) raised in a gesture and distance of hand palm centre from the fingertips and the valley between the fingers. The hand region

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... first segmented from the image using depth data followed by the forearm removal. Four multi-class support vector machine (SVM) kernels are also compared and used for recognition of gestures with extracted feature vector as an input. The experimental results achieved recognition accuracy of 99 and 95.7% on two public complex static gesture datasets using Gaussian SVM kernel function as a classifier. The proposed approach is found to be comparable and even outperforms some of the state-of-the-art techniques in terms of high recognition accuracies, even after using a single cue for hand segmentation and extraction of features in the complex background which results in non-dependency on too many cues and much hardware.